Stress, tone and intonation

Assuming a continuum between syllable timing and stress timing, the number of varieties which exhibit tendencies towards syllable timing is impressive: InSAfE, BlSAfE, EAfrE, NigE, GhE, NigP, GhP, IndE, PakE, SgE, MalE and PhlE. For these varieties vowel reduction is not as common as in RP and in some of them [ə] is rare, or more a feature of fast and connected speech, rather than of citation forms. On the other hand some of these varieties are reported to avoid syllabic consonants, in favor of schwa plus consonant: IndE, SgE, MalE and PhlE. All varieties that were cited in connection with syllable timing also display stress shifts in individual words or sets of words, in relation to RP norms. These are often shifts to the right (e.g. real^Iize rather than RP ^Irealise); though some words in some varieties exhibit shifts to the left (e.g. from penultimate to antepenultimate syllables as in CamE a^Idolescence, rather than RP ado^Ilescence). Most of these varieties do not use stress to differentiate between pairs like ^Iabsent (adj.) versus ab^Isent (verb).

As far as intonation is concerned most varieties report a smaller range of intonational contours compared to RP. Whilst this area is one that needs closer attention, statements like the following will illustrate this general claim:

CFE: great use of rising intonation in statements;

BlSAfE: tone and information units are shorter than in RP;

NigE: Sentence stress is rarely used for contrast. Given information is rarely de-accented;

MalE: less change of intonation (or pitch direction) occurs in sentences compared to RP.

A number of African varieties of English make use of lexical and (sometimes) grammatical tone, and report an interaction between stress and tone: NigE, GhE, NigP and Kamtok.